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Here's your hat stuff. Enjoy!
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A little old Polish lady stopped by the yard to pick our dandelions, and showed me how to make a real hair wreath out of real, living flowers.
In other news, I'm officially one of two new coDirectors for the Bristol Friends of Faire. So this year, I have a really good excuse for not having time to make major site updates.....
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Remember about a year ago I started putting up directions for hat patterns and hat making? Well,,,,, I just finished writing up the last three that I had photo work done for. Yes, things take me this long sometimes. But now there are directions for a Biggins, a Simple Caul, and a Northern Coif.
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I've been making leather masks. I put up pictures. Woot.
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I made a big pink dress. Thre's more about that over in the gallery.
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I was asked to teach a hatmaking class for BAPA (it's a performer's thing at Bristol) this year. Unfortunately, they want me to cover making several styles of hats in under an hour. To me, this screams, "HANDOUT!" There's now some basic hatmaking info in the Patterns area.
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As you may (or may not) know, I'm pursuing a degree in Fashion Design and for most of the school year I have to make "normal" clothes. (Sure, like fashion is ever normal, right?) Anyway, I put up some pictures of my work from the 2007 CoD fashion show.
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Well, it's almost the 2007 season, and I've just gotten around to posting most of the gallery additions for the 2006 season. I've also added more craft stuff, because I decided I couldn't live another day without learning serious leather work.
You know, I've been mostly off-line for most of the last two years. There's been an ongoing family situation, which finally ended the only way it could. And that pretty much sucks. Things are getting better, and I'm starting to get my life back together and on-track. I'll be done with my Associate's degree in Fashion soon, and then on to a BA. My sweetie and I hope to get a house soon, and start our life together. Barring weird catastrophes, updates should start coming more regularly.
And since it's Memorial Day, THANK YOU to all our troops, present, past, and future, for your courage and your willingness to do a job that I don't have the guts or the commitment to do.
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I put up a gallery of yarns. Yes, yarns. I made them all, and they're pretty cool. Sure, it's not the kind of gallery update that anyone was hoping for, but it's something -- new pictures, new words, general sense of new-ness.... Oh, right, and I made a cool little image previewer javascript gidgy, so it's all fanc-Y. Don't worry: we will soon return you to your regularly scheduled costuming site.
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The man and I will be at the Ohio Renaissance Festival this weekend, along with a huge bunch of Bristolians. Should anyone be looking, I'll be near the beer. ;)
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I am publicly acknowledging that
I am a dumbass and still haven't posted pics, info, or anything from the summer. Sorry about that.
This is what happens when school season starts before faire season ends. :( Here's the Cliff Notes version:
--I managed to finish this dress
over the summer, sans sleeves, for Sarah
and Bess and Edmond's Bristol
visit. I have pictures somewhere. I'll have more after the weekend. I've not
exactly gotten around to finishing the sleeves (which were the point of the
whole freakin' dress), but I'm not sure I am going to now.... I got the most
fabulous embroidered chemise from Blackwerks, and I'd hate to cover it up! (If
you're looking for a fantastically fancy chemie, mail me and I'll pass you along
to the proprietors.) Diary will be updated ... er, someday. It was totally great to see
Sarah again, and meet Bess and Edmond (who are the dearest things to come out of England since Teddy),
and meet all the LJ costumers who made it out. Y'all rock my knee socks!
--The Bristol Friends of Faire "Special Interest" Costume Contests (One each for Pirate, Barbarian, and Fantasy) were a huge
hit both as contests and as a stage show. Thanks to everyone who watched and participated, helped out, or donated prizes! I've never
been a bigger nervous wreck about anything I've done, and I've never been more gushingly happy, either. I am so proud of the way these
worked out! Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, I'll be posting the schedule and topics for next year's contests in the spring. :)
--I made a pseudo-Victorian wedding dress for a very happy client, and will hopefully someday have good pictures to post.
--I made a costume for a performer at Bristol, who turned out not to be such a happy client. There's a long saga. I thought the
dress turned out well, but due to the situation, it will not be getting a page in the gallery. Ironically, it won a cast award for
best new costume in her troupe.
--I've begun combing and spinning the fleece.
--I actually had to ask a teacher for an incomplete in Bridal Couture so that I could finish a wedding dress. There's some irony
there....
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Well, basically.... I expect that there are still some images missing. Please let me know if you stumble across any. (If possible, please send me the URL of the page with the missing image. I hate to sound lazy, but today has totally reminded me that I have a *lot* of pages, and a thousand times more images!)
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The site has been down while I switched hosts. Long story. Let's just say that this was not a planned event... Once things are fully back up and running, I'll post the diary of the dress I made last week for Bess and Edmond's trip out to Bristol....
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My sweetie bought me a fleece a couple weeks ago, which provided me with a marvelous opportunity to learn how to scour fleece. The original email I sent a few friends about the process was pretty well received, so I've turned it into a page. (Because right now anything that makes a few people laugh is a good thing.) Oh, and don't ever take commissions on while you're taking two very intense summer classes. Yipes!
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The Bristol Renaissance Faire will once again be running their costume contest! Yay! Hooray! Actually, there will be more than one contest running. In addition to the Faire's season-long Elizabethan Costume Contest, there will be three small, "special interest" costume contests run by the Bristol Friends of Faire group. (The Friends of Faire is a patron's group at the Bristol Renaissance Faire. Yours Truly works for said group.) Each one of these three contests will target a different type of non-Elizabethan costume that's popular at the Faire. On 7/30, there will be a Pirate contest, on 8/12 there will be a Barbarian contest, and on 8/27 there will be a Fantastical contest. (Note Bene: For the purposes of these contests, "Pirate" is defined as any seafaring soul with a penchant for relieving others of property, "Barbarian" is defined as anyone who might, conceivably, fought the Romans (including the Romans), and "Fantastical" refers to creatures and characters of Mythological origin. Not to put to fine a point on it.... But I've seen Klingons in Kilts at faire once, and that's just not the goal. ;) ) We are sponsoring these contests to show our appreciation for those patrons and FoF members who contribute so much to the atmosphere of the Faire by putting their time, thought, and care into creating amazing costumes from all sorts of eras, and to encourage people to branch out and try their hands at costumes they might not have thought they had an occasion to wear. And, heck, it should be a grand lot of fun! So "Arg, mateys!", let's have us some fun! And let's show the whole costuming universe that 'Bethan costumers are the best, because we can turn out a quality, well designed costume for just about any era we try for. :)
In slightly related news, the Friends of Faire group will also be running a series of educational salons this season, both in the garden for our members, and out of the garden for the general Faire-going public. Drop in and see what we've got going on! There will be costuming topics, arms and armour topics, dance instruction, and all sorts of educational craziness.
ps -- I'm telling you about these things because I'm helping to coordinate them. The special interest costume contest and the regular salons are totally new, and we're really hoping that people like them and we can make something really great for everyone.
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I love spring, and I adore easter egg hunts, so I made one for all of you! I've started adding new pictures to my gallery -- faire shots that were taken last year of costumes I did (for myself and others). I didn't have them when the gallery pages for the costumes were made, but now I do and you all get to hunt for them! And since it's after 3pm on a friday before a holiday, I know your bosses won't mind if you take a little lookee-see around the gallery. ;) I also started a page on some of the craft stuff I've been playing with since last august. I've been totally crazy with school lately -- turns out that fashion design is about the most time consuming major in the entire history of EVER. COD has a fashion show coming up in early May. If I can get any good shots of my entries back from the photographers they tell me they will have, I'll start a gallery of clothing from this century. Won't that be a trip? Happy Spring Holiday, everyone! Enjoy the dandelions. :)
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An astute reader pointed out that I managed to delete the note about my CafePress store, which makes me about the worst self-promoter in the history of ever. So now it's back, and I've added it to all of the little "help support this site" sidebars. Many thanks to all of you who have shown your support of my efforts with this site, either through payPal, or sending email, postcards, or supplies. I am touched and blessed by your support.
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Well, I've been avoiding my computer for the last few months. I still love my little tangerine iMac dearly, but she's gotten older and slower, and she's not really connected to the outside world right now, so web updates have involved putting all my files on my little flash drive, walking them down the hall, and uploading them from my parent's hemispherical iMac which has been sittin' pretty on top of my DSL line. Unfortunately, the tangerine iMac had hit it's limits for RAM capacity, and getting to work on a wireless network would have cost me some serious cash. So what's a girl to do? I bought a new computer. ;) The contents of Arachne's brain (Arachne is the tangerine iMac -- she's mostly a web surfing machine) now reside in Isis, my amazingly pretty, screamin' fast new Intel iMac. (Technical note for the mac geeks in the audience: What you've heard about the intel based macs crashing in apps is, unfortunately, true right now. Mail crashes a lot. But, it crashes and restarts faster than Mail on a G3 can switch between accounts, so I can't say I care. Mail literally starts in under a second on the intel iMac. Like, *wow*. Dreamweaver still takes a hefty 17 seconds to load, but again, that's faster than the old G3s. Also, if you're thinking about upgrading to an intel based mac, you should *remove* any Norton/Symantec software (ie, norton anti-virus) from your old computer before doing the firewire transfer of your old machine's files and programs to the new machine. Trust me here. It will appear to work brilliantly, but you will not be able to reboot the machine successfully. The boot sequence will stall when it tries to understand the norton system files (kernal extensions), and you will not get a login window. You can boot the machine in safe mode (reboot with the shift key down), then log in and delete everything from norton/symantec from your machine. I deleted everything that I still had from os9 -- I don't use it, and I believe in overkill. Now, I know this is a lot of technical info for a costume site, but it's here mostly for crawlers to pick up and hand out to anyone else who is doing the same web searches I was doing this morning after 15 hours of not being able to reboot my system (during which time I did a full system reinstall, which still didn't fix the problem). Don't ask why I didn't try the safe boot sooner. I, erm, forgot about that one. *sheepish*)
For the non-geeks in the audience, or those who simply want to know why me getting a new iMac is news that you'd care about, it goes like this: It's just gotten much faster and easier for me to update this site. So here's the first of several pages I've been meaning to get around to putting together: Yvonne's Kirtle and Doublet
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I've finally gotten my computer hooked back up, and started getting gallery pages made for things I did last summer. So, I present to you the Outlander Surcoats, my new black kirtle, and a wig. I'll be putting up a page for the doublet and kirtle I made for Yvonne just as soon as a get hold of pictures of it. I also put up a page on workspace setups (just in case anyone else has been forcibly downsized by their family recently), and a few new tips and tricks I've learned from my fashion classes. The school is making me learn how to sew. I still think that's a hoot....
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I'd like to send a heart-felt thank you to all of you who have helped support this site financially through PayPal. I'm currently jobless, so your support really has kept the site online. Thanks also to all of you who have wondered if I was ok. I am. There have some serious health issues in my family (both parents have had surgeries, been through physical therapy, etc, and I inherited my grandmother and all of her doctor's appointments, medications, and cooking -- old people are a lot of work!), and I'm in school and trying desperately to catch up on my classes. I changed my major to Fashion Design (to no one's surprise but my own, apparently), and I'm learning lots of stuff (like why commercial jeans never fit right) but it's sucking up a huge amount of time. I'm knitting, crocheting, and spinning like a fiend trying to get gifts in order for the winder holidays, and I'm starting to long for the old days of serious job related depression when I was actually capable of sitting still, staring at a wall, and doing nothing. (Well, ok, no, I'm not. I'd just like to sit still and not work on anything for a while.)
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Sempstress has had over 40,000 unique visitors so far this year (and served almost 215,000 pages). That's a lot of people! I remember back when I first started running this site,how excited I was to log 1,000 hits to my main page. *laugh* I also received my first PayPal donation. It was very sweet, and it made me so happy I almost cried. Thank you, S.
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I've started adding links on my pattern pages to the work of other costumers who have been kind enough to come forward and let me know they've used the patterns. If you've used any of my patterns, and you'd like to be linked in, please send me email. I'd love to see what you've done, and get a link up. It'll be peachy-keen! I'll also be adding in a gallery page to collect all those links, and feature costumers who said that while they didn't use any one pattern specifically, they used the site as a whole.
I've also had to resort to begging. The other thing that's now on all of the pattern pages is a PayPal donation button. It takes both money and time to keep this site up, and add new stuff to it. I didn't get a chance to add anything to the site over the winter, because I was working so much just to be able to make my rent and bills. After a family emergency early in the spring, I had to leave my job to have time to deal with things. Right now, I'm basically relying on my sewing business to make ends meet, and I'm strapped. There's a very real danger that this site will be one of the things that I won't be able to do anymore. Please, if the information I've posted has helped you make your own costumes, or costumes for others, consider sending me a couple bucks. You can help keep this site online.
Many many thanks to those who have helped out in the past (with supplies to help me continue putting up patterning instructions, and the anonymous "tip" that paid for a year's domain registration), and to those who have sent the great postcards from Europe -- you all warm my heart. My aplogies to anyone who tried to contact me over the winter and spring and did not hear back. Things were ... crazy.
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I've been really into hats lately. I added a gallery just for them.
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Yeah, so it finally dawned on me that I do, technically, design things. So I thought I'd take a go at making the site look a little less utilitarian and a little more professional. I hope you all like it. I've also fixed all the broken images I found going through the pages, and many of the broken links. I'm working on new content as well, but I wanted to get the new look online while I was still excited about it.
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I realized that there are a couple things I work out every time I make a skirt, so I made a couple little charts. It's nothing earth shattering, just some helpers for sizing farthingales, figuring up paneled skirts, and I made up a little worksheet for figuring skirt length, based on the article I wrote about it. (Fixed all the broken images in there, too.) Can we say, "Avoiding a Hamlet assignment"? Yeah.
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